Pundits weigh in on Netanyahu speech
Several hours after Netanyahu’s speech, the analyses of the long-awaited address gradually trickle in.
In The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg argues that the speech was primarily directed at the Obama administration and Israeli voters.
“The speech had two targets, and neither one was Ayatollah Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader,” he writes. “The first set of targets consisted of President Obama, his secretary of state, John Kerry, and Kerry’s chief Iran negotiator, Wendy Sherman. Netanyahu called them all out, though not by name, for being hopelessly, haplessly naive in the face of evil… The second target was the conservative portion of the Israeli electorate, which has, like much of the rest of Israel, grown tired of Netanyahu.”
Overall, “Netanyahu may—may—have succeeded in putting Obama on the back foot,” Goldberg writes. “There’s a reasonable chance that this speech will be forgotten in a month. There’s also a reasonable chance that Netanyahu just made Obama’s mission harder.”
Over in New York Magazine, a more pugnacious Jonathan Chait slams Netanyahu for being a “man without a plan,” saying that throughout his address, the prime minister “did not make even the barest case for a better alternative” to the nuclear talks.
“Netanyahu’s lack of strategic coherence reflects a defiant, self-pitying strain of Jewish thought. (Leon Wieseltier dissected it brilliantly a dozen years ago.) It equates all strategic enemies of the Jewish people with each other, in a long, undifferentiated historical stream. They all share the same goal, the complete elimination of the Jewish people, from the Persian kings of the story of Purim through Hitler through whichever geopolitical enemy faces Israel at any given moment,” he writes.
Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, Paul Waldman criticizes the speech for conflating various terror groups under one blanket category of militant Islam, and denounces Netanyahu’s foreign policy approach as “absurd.”
“This is the Republican foreign policy perspective, as much now as it ever was: there is only black and white, no complexity, no compromise, and all enemies are the same,” he writes.
Waldman takes issue with the prime minister’s suggestion that the US walk away from the talks, hoping Iran will capitulate.
“That’s his alternative: Do nothing, and instead of just going ahead and developing nuclear weapons, Iran will see the light and completely reverse everything it’s been doing. To call that position ‘absurd’ is too kind. You don’t have to be some kind of foreign policy whiz to grasp that there’s something weird about arguing that 1) Iran is a nation run by genocidal maniacs; 2) they want nuclear weapons so they can annihilate Israel; and 3) the best way to stop this is to abandon negotiations to limit their nuclear program and just wait to see what they do. But that’s the position Netanyahu and his supporters in the Republican Party are now committed to.”
